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Integrated Sovereignty, Philip M. Nichols

Philip M. Nichols

Sovereignty confounds legal scholarship. The doctrinal definition of sovereignty does not describe the real world, yet that definition dominates both the application of law and scholarly debate. Robert Dahl’s empirical methodology, never before applied to sovereignty, yields at least two insights. First, sovereignty does not consist of absolute control of everything, instead sovereignty is the final control of some things. Second, many different entities possess sovereignty; thus the sovereignty described in doctrinal international law is actually integrated. Accepting the notion of integrated sovereignty allows international law to better describe the empirical world, and positions international law to accommodate the needs …